shakespeare’s tremor and orwell’s cough. Copyright © 2012 by John J. Ross.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information,
address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ross, John J. (John James), 1966–

Shakespeare’s tremor and Orwell’s cough : the medical lives of famous
writers / John J. Ross, M.D. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978- 0-312- 60076-1 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-01207-4 (e-book)
1. Authors, English—Biography. 2. Authors, English—Health and hygiene.
3. Literature and medicine. 4. Authors, American—Biography. 5. Authors,
American—Health and hygiene. 6. Diseases and literature. I. Title.
PR106.R59 2012
820.9—dc23
2012026577

First Edition: October 2012

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Sweating tubs used in the seventeenth-century treatment of
syphilis. (The Royal Society)

1. THE HARDEST KNIFE ILL-USED:

Shakespeare’s Tremor
The real mystery of Shakespeare, a thousand times more mysterious than
any matter of the will, is: why is it that—unlike Dante, Cervantes, Chau-
cer, Tolstoy, whomever you wish—he makes what seems a voluntary
choice to stop writing?
—Harold Bloom

In Shakespeare’s tomb lies infinitely more than Shakespeare ever wrote.

—Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses”

Twenty years he lived in London . . . Twenty years he dallied there be-

tween conjugal love and its chaste delights and scortatory love and its
foul pleasures.
—James Joyce, Ulysses

His fitful fever returned. Master Shakespeare pulled the hood of his cloak
down low over his eyes and hurried from his lodgings in Bishopsgate,
walking as quickly as he could on his hobbled legs. He awkwardly dodged
a pair of rambling pigs and picked his way through the dung and muck of
the city streets. The stench and fi lth rarely troubled him now, as they had
when he first came here from the country. Nearer the bridge, the clamor
of the city increased: the clatter of carts, the cries of street peddlers, the
2 | SHAKESPEARE’S TREMOR AND ORWELL’S COUGH

gossip of alewives, the drunken braggadocio of London gallants. A black-

clad Puritan surveyed the scene sourly and made brief eye contact with
Will. The player hung his head and balled his hands into fists—to hide
the telltale rash on his palms.
London Bridge was marvelous and strange, a massive structure built
over with splendid houses. With relief he entered the dark, claustropho-
bic tunnel beneath the dwellings. Inside, a continual roar of noise: the tidal
rush of water between the ancient piers; waterwheels creaking; appren-
tices brawling; carters disputing the right-of-way; a blind fiddler playing;
sheep bleating on their way to Eastcheap, bound for slaughter. He left the
shelter of the bridge, and emerged into painful sunlight on the other side.
His shins throbbed and his muscles ached. In spite of himself, he peered
up at the great stone gate at the end of the bridge, adorned with traitors’
heads on pikes. Shreds of moldy flesh clung to the grinning skulls, their
tattered hair bleached by sun and rain.
In Southwark, he heard the barking mastiffs and the howling crowd at
the Bear Garden. He imagined old Sackerson the bear bellowing, lashing
out with his claws, chained to a post, set on by dogs. A glimpse of ragged
children playing in an alley filled him with thoughts of home and a pang
of loneliness and shame. Before a row of brothels he saw a scabby beggar-
woman with sunken nose and ulcerated shins. After years of faithful ser-
vice in the stews, she has been turned out in the street to die of the pox. A
chill of fear ran up his spine, and he looked away.
There was a pounding in his head and he felt dull and stupid.
He  circled many times through a maze of flyblown houses before he
stumbled on the place. A servant showed him down a set of stairs. The bard
descended into a hot cellar reeking of sulfur. A vast oven filled the room
with flickering orange light. The sweaty heads of groaning men peered
out from large wooden tubs. But the tubs were not filled with water. A
sallow and emaciated man carrying iron tongs scurried round, feeding hot
bricks into the tubs through a trapdoor. He poured vinegar onto the heaps
of bricks and acrid steam rose up, making the glistening men within
moan and shake.
The doctor suddenly appeared beside Will, startling him. He was sleek
and prosperous, with a dainty goatee. Though he smiled reassuringly, the
poet noticed that he kept a safe distance. In a soothing, urbane voice, the
 THE HARDEST KNIFE ILL- USED | 3

physician explained the treatment: stewed prunes to evacuate the bowels;

succulent meats to ease digestion; cinnabar and the sweating tub to cleanse
the disease from the skin. The doctor warned of minor side effects: uncon-
trolled drooling, fetid breath, bloody gums, shakes and palsies. Yet des-
perate diseases called for desperate remedies, of course.
Shakespeare extended a handful of silver coins. The physician took
them with a gloved hand, scrutinized them carefully, and put them in his
purse with the hint of a smirk. He pointed Will toward the skinny, pallid
man tending bricks at the great oven. When the poet looked round again,
the doctor had vanished.
The gaunt man tending the bricks was not quite right in the head. His
hands shook, and he seemed both timorous and irritable. When he saw
the poet’s rash, he cackled and slobbered, revealing a mouth full of rotten
teeth. “Bit by a Winchester goose, eh? Ha-ha! A few good sweats will fi x
that, my lad. Into the powdering tub with you, then!”
The poet stripped and stood ashamed, his flesh covered in scaly blots.
He ner vously clambered over the side of a tub, and sat down on a plank
nailed to the side. Under the plank, the wooden bottom had been removed,
leaving an earthen pit. The queer thin man clumsily secured a heavy lid
over the top of the tub, leaving an opening just large enough for the poet’s
head. Then he popped open the trapdoor at the base of the tub and placed
a hot metal plate at the poet’s feet. He tossed red powder on the plate. The
dust disappeared in a mephitic bloom of hissing fumes. The doctor’s man
repeated this again and again, until Will began to gag. A fine metallic pow-
der settled on his body. The thin man piled hot bricks into the pit under
the seat, and doused them with vinegar. As the acid waves of steam bil-
lowed upward, the bard started to tremble and sweat. This week would
not be a pleasant one.

Even those who know little about Shakespeare are aware that there is a
sort of controversy about the authorship of his plays. A vocal and eccen-
tric minority doubts that a man of Shakespeare’s background could pos-
sess literary genius, and speculates his plays were really written by an
aristocrat who wished for some reason to remain anonymous. This belief
rests on two snobbish and mistaken assumptions: first, that a great deal of
formal education is essential for great writing; and second, that creativity
4 | SHAKESPEARE’S TREMOR AND ORWELL’S COUGH

depends on wealth and comfort. A good case could be made that the ex-
act opposite is true. Many great authors were largely self-taught, and ei-
ther did not attend university or dropped out. Furthermore, a dose of
youthful misery may help a writer by serving as a powerful stimulus to
fantasy and imagination. A recurrent biographical pattern in great writers
is a happy early childhood, followed by an adolescence made insecure by
financial catastrophe, the loss of a parent, or other traumas. Such was the
case with William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare was born in April 1564, in the market town of Stratford.
We know almost nothing about his mother Mary, but quite a lot about his
father. John Shakespeare combined something of Falstaff ’s wit and rascal-
ity, Kent’s stubbornness and loyalty, and Lear’s feckless ill judgment. He
made a lawful fortune from the glove trade, and an illegal one from usury
and black market wool dealing. His fellow citizens liked him well enough
to elect him the town’s bailiff, an office akin to that of mayor today. How-
ever, the gossamer prosperity of the Shakespeares unraveled in William’s
teenage years, as John ran afoul of the law and lost much of his money
and his lands. Elizabethan England was something between a modern
constitutional monarchy and a police state. Spies and informers enforced
religious orthodoxy and an oppressive system of trade regulations and mo-
nopolies. John Shakespeare was fined heavily, not only for his shady busi-
ness practices, but also for his repeated failures to attend Protestant
services, one of several signs that the family were probably closet Catholics.
If John Shakespeare once hoped to send his brilliant oldest son to get
a gentleman’s university education, near bankruptcy now made this im-
possible. Young Will would have studied Latin and rhetoric in the local
grammar school until the age of fifteen or sixteen, probably getting more
formal education than Dickens, Yeats, or Herman Melville would receive.
He then may have served as a tutor in a noble Catholic household in
Lancashire. By age eighteen, he was back in Stratford and hastily wed to
Anne Hathaway, twenty-six years old and two months pregnant at the
time of the marriage. According to tradition, Will toiled in his father’s
glove shop, and might also have moonlighted as a scrivener or a law clerk.
Anne gave birth to the couple’s daughter Susannah in May 1583, followed
by the twins, Hamnet and Judith, in February 1585. Shortly thereafter,
 THE HARDEST KNIFE ILL- USED | 5

Shakespeare went to seek his fortune in London. According to a durable—

if somewhat dubious—Stratford legend, Shakespeare was whipped for
poaching deer on the lands of one Sir Thomas Lucy, a notorious persecu-
tor of local Catholics. Will made matters worse by posting a lampoon of
Lucy on his park gate, and fled town one step ahead of Lucy’s thugs.
London was home to a burgeoning and intensely competitive the-
ater scene. Some playwrights were college graduates; others, such as
Shakespeare, Kyd, and Jonson, were not. Shakespeare’s quick success,
rural origins, and lack of a university degree made him the natural tar-
get of jealous attacks from the University Wits. These included Robert
Greene, George Peele, and that great spendthrift of language, Thomas
Nashe, a trio as noted for their depravity as for their abundant literary
talents. All three would soon be dead. Their enemies blamed their pass-
ing on the pox, or syphilis, the dread disease that became a Shakespear-
ian obsession.
By the early 1590s, Shakespeare had obtained the patronage of Henry
Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton. Wriothesley was an effete dandy
of flexible sexuality, with a penchant for poetry. Both of Shakespeare’s
racy, best-selling narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of
Lucrece, are dedicated to him. The dedication for Lucrece, published in
1594, suggests that by then Shakespeare and Southampton were on
familiar terms: “The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without end . . .
what I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours.” According to
Shakespeare’s earliest biographer, Nicholas Rowe, Southampton once pre-
sented Shakespeare with £1000, a staggering (and almost certainly ex-
aggerated) sum of money. Thus, by the time Shakespeare was middle-aged,
he had achieved substantial wealth and fame. However, his success was
blighted by the death of his only son Hamnet in 1596, and perhaps also
by a serious health scare that may have left deep marks on his writing.
D. H. Lawrence was struck by how saturated some of Shakespeare’s
work is with venereal disease: “I am convinced that some of Shakespeare’s
horror and despair, in his tragedies, arose from the shock of his con-
sciousness of syphilis.” Anthony Burgess was probably the first commen-
tator with the effrontery to suggest that Shakespeare himself had syphilis.
In his novel Nothing Like the Sun, Burgess depicted the poor bard as a
6 | SHAKESPEARE’S TREMOR AND ORWELL’S COUGH

pocky cuckold. He later characterized Shakespeare as having a “gratu-

itous venereal obsession,” an observation subsequently echoed by schol-
ars Katherine Duncan-Jones and Harold Bloom.
References to syphilis in Shakespeare are more abundant, intrusive
and clinically exact than those of his contemporaries. For example, there
are only six lines referring to venereal disease in all seven plays of Chris-
topher Marlowe. However, forty-three lines in Measure for Measure, fift y-
one lines in Troilus and Cressida, and sixty-five lines in Timon of Athens
unequivocally allude to syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases
(STDs).
References to syphilis and STDs are not uniformly distributed
throughout Shakespeare’s plays. In his first fourteen plays, up to The
Merchant of Venice in 1596, there is an average of only three lines per
play on venereal disease. (Most of these occur in The Comedy of Errors,
dated from 1592–3, which contains twenty-three lines referring to
STDs.) In the next twenty plays, from 1597’s Henry IV Part 1 to Cymbeline
in 1609, there is an average of fifteen lines per play. The final four plays, The
Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, Henry VIII, and Two Noble Kinsmen, average
less than two lines per play referring to syphilis and other STDs. (These
last two plays are generally accepted as being roughly equal collabora-
tions between Shakespeare and John Fletcher.)
Could Shakespeare’s mid-career explosion of syphilitic content be
explained by a general increase in bawdry on the Jacobean and late Eliza-
bethan stages? Perhaps, but this would not explain why Shakespeare takes
up the subject of syphilis in the early play Comedy of Errors, only to drop it
and return to it with a vengeance later on. Of course, Shakespeare’s interest
in syphilis does not mean that he was personally infected. Shakespeare
would be well aware of the effects of syphilis on London’s literary bohemia
of the 1590s, just as an observer of the New York arts scene of the 1980s
would be unpleasantly familiar with the ravages of AIDS. But is there
evidence that Shakespeare’s own lifestyle put him at risk for syphilis?
Shakespeare’s marriage to Anne Hathaway was marked by long peri-
ods of separation. For most of their life, Will lived and worked in Lon-
don, while Anne was home in Stratford. They had no children after 1585,
when Anne was only twenty-nine. Perhaps this was related to obstetrical
 THE HARDEST KNIFE ILL- USED | 7

complications from the birth of the twins, but it might also suggest that
their sexual congress was infrequent. Infamously, he bequeathed her only
the “second-best bed.” (Despite the ingeniously benign explanations of
Shakespeare’s biographers, it is hard to believe that the supreme master of
the English language intended this as anything other than a sly, final in-
sult.) Away from home, did Shakespeare expend much energy seeking
better beds? In a 1602 diary entry, a law student, John Manningham, re-
corded this salacious anecdote about the playwright and the actor Rich-
ard Burbage:

Upon a time when Burbage played Richard the Third, there was a
citizen grew so far in liking with him that before she went from
the play she appointed him to come that night unto her by the name
of Richard the Third. Shakespeare, overhearing their conversa-
tion, went before, was entertained, and at his game ere Burbage
came. Then message being brought that Richard the Third was at
the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that William the
Conqueror was before Richard the Third.

Even if this story seems too clever to be true, it suggests Shakespeare en-
joyed a popular reputation as something less than a paragon of marital
fidelity. Shakespeare’s high sexual alertness is also borne out by his ro-
bust ribald vocabulary. In Shakespeare’s Bawdy, Eric Partridge defines
1418 sexual or vulgar expressions in the works of Shakespeare, in a glos-
sary of over 200 pages. Shakespeare’s amorous reputation is further rein-
forced in the Sonnets, and especially in a peculiar poem entitled Willobie
His Avisa, published in 1594.
Willobie His Avisa purports to be an earnest moral tract about a vir-
tuous wife who spurns the advances of her would-be seducers. The book
was popular and went through several printings, probably because it was
actually a literary hoax and satire of the sexual mores of prominent Eliz-
abethans. Authorities found it subversive, and enhanced its scandalous
cachet by confiscating and burning copies of it in 1599.
The origins of Willobie His Avisa are obscure. In the book’s introduc-
tion, one Hadrian Dorrell claims to have found the manuscript of Avisa
8 | SHAKESPEARE’S TREMOR AND ORWELL’S COUGH

in the bedchamber of his friend and fellow Oxford student Henry Willobie.
Willobie is away on military ser vice, and Dorrell is so impressed with
the epic poem that he cannot resist preparing it for publication. Needless
to say, there is no record of a Hadrian Dorrell having attended Oxford at
this time, although there was a real Henry Willobie (or Willoughby) at
Oxford, who conveniently died in 1596. It remains unclear whether Wil-
lobie was the real author of Avisa, whether he was the butt of a sopho-
moric prank, or whether he was only a handy stalking horse for the actual
author.
Various failed suitors of Avisa are mocked in the first half of the
poem. For example, “Caveleiro,” who may represent an Elizabethan noble
with the equestrian moniker of Sir Ralph Horsey, is ridiculed as syphi-
litic: his “wanny cheeks” and “shaggy locks” make Avisa “fear the piles, or
else the pox.” The second half of the poem concerns the vain attempts of
“H. W.” to woo Avisa. H.W. is given cynical romantic advice by a man ex-
pert in the arts of seduction, the “old player” “W.S.,” his “familiar friend.”
In this passage, the passion of H.W. for the chaste Avisa is described in
vocabulary evocative of venereal disease:

H.W. being suddenly infected with the contagion of a fantastical

fit . . . at length not able any longer to endure the burning heat of
so fervent a humor, betrayed the secrecy of his disease unto his
familiar friend W.S. who not long before had tried the courtesy of
like passion, and was now recovered of the like infection . . . he
now would secretly laugh at his friend’s folly, that had given occa-
sion not long before unto others to laugh at his own . . . he deter-
mined to see whether it would sort to a happier end for this new
actor, than it did for the old player. But at length this Comedy was
liken to have grown to a Tragedy, by the weak and feeble estate
H.W. was brought into . . . until Time and Necessity, being his best
physicians brought him a plaster, if not to heal, yet in part to ease
his malady. In all which discourse is lively represented the unruly
rage of unbridled fancy, having the reins to rove at liberty, with
the diverse and sundry changes of affections and temptations,
which Will, set loose from Reason, can devise . . .
 THE HARDEST KNIFE ILL- USED | 9

The pointed references to a “new actor,” an “old player,” “Comedy,”

“Tragedy,” “Will,” and a doggerel parody of Shakespeare that follows,
strongly suggest that the “old player” is William Shakespeare. Could H.W.,
the “new actor,” be Shakespeare’s pansexual patron, Henry Wriothesley?
If Wriothesley, one of the kingdom’s most prominent nobles, had been the
major target of the book’s satire, this would explain why the Elizabethan
authorities were compelled to burn it. The overbearing medical meta-
phor, and the striking word choices, “contagion,” “disease,” “burning,”
“infection,” and “malady,” intimate that the “weak and feeble” Wriothesley
and Shakespeare are suffering from a sexually transmitted infection, rather
than the pangs of unrequited love. “Having the reins to rove at liberty” sug-
gests “running of the reins [kidneys],” Elizabethan slang for gonorrhea.
The eminent Shakespearian scholar Samuel Schoenbaum was per-
plexed by Willobie His Avisa, but did allow that “this curious work seems
to have something to do with the Sonnets . . . one can appreciate the temp-
tation to identify ‘W.S.’ with William Shakespeare, and ‘H.W.’ with Henry
Wriothesley, the proposed Fair Youth of the Sonnets.” The scenario in
Avisa—Shakespeare and Southampton in love with the same woman,
with the innuendo that she has infected them both with venereal dis-
ease—is remarkably similar to the love triangle, and the obsession with
sexual pollution, of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
Four hundred years later, critical and popular opinion is still sharply
divided on Shakespeare’s dense, knotty Sonnets. Are they confessional
and autobiographical? Is Shakespeare just flattering a vain and wealthy
patron? Is he riffi ng with emotion and personae in a series of consum-
mate poetic performances? Or do the Sonnets contain elements of all these
possibilities?
The Sonnets can be divided into three parts. In the first seventeen
sonnets, the lovely youth is urged to marry and procreate; perhaps the
youth’s family, who were trying to get him to agree to an arranged mar-
riage, commissioned these poems. Such a circumstance would apply to
both of the leading candidates for the lovely youth: Southampton and
William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke. Sonnets 18–126 concern the po-
et’s passionate attachment to the callous and selfish youth. (The homo-
erotic drift of these poems has inspired many comically defensive assertions
10 | SHAKESPEARE’S TREMOR AND ORWELL’S COUGH

of Shakespeare’s manliness by critics and biographers.) The final poems,

Sonnets 127–154, chronicle the poet’s sexual enslavement to his dark mis-
tress, who is cruel, capricious, unfaithful, unbeautiful, and infected with
venereal disease.
The Sonnets are fi lled with imagery of sin, infection, and defi lement:
the word “disgrace” occurs nine times; “shame” appears fourteen times.
Sexual transgression lies at the heart of the Sonnets. The poet and his
mistress are lustful and sexually voracious (Sonnets 129, 135, and 151, the
“gross” sonnet); hypocritical enemies accuse the poet of promiscuity
(Sonnet 121). The lovely youth is also sexually reckless. In Sonnet 35, the
poet forgives the youth for his “sensual fault.” In Sonnets 40–42, it is made
clear that the youth has been sleeping with the poet’s mistress, leading
the masochistic poet to respond: “Take all my loves, my love” (Sonnet 40).
In Sonnet 94, the fair youth is sternly warned of the dangers of venereal
disease: “But if that flower with base infection meet/The basest weed
outbraves his dignity . . . lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.”
This admonition is repeated in Sonnet 95, where the youth’s “sins” and
lascivious “sport” are associated with cankers, spots, and blots. The poet
closes with a priapic warning: “The hardest knife ill-used doth lose his
edge.”
In Sonnet 144, the poet frets that his “better angel,” or “a man right
fair,” will be “fired out,” or venereally infected, by his “bad angel,” or “female
evil.” The Sonnets conclude with two variations on a classical theme: a
nymph igniting the waters of love with Cupid’s stolen torch. Shakespeare
transforms this into an ironic metaphor for venereal disease: Cupid’s
“fire” is the dysuria, or painful urination, of gonorrhea, and the hot bath
is the tub treatment of syphilis. In Sonnet 153, the poet, “a sad distempered
guest,” seeks this “seething bath, which yet men prove/Against strange
maladies a sovereign cure.” Specifically, the poet seeks a remedy for the
“new fire” acquired from his “mistress’ eye.” Here, the “eye” of his mis-
tress is her pudendum. In Sonnet 154, the unfortunate poet laments,
“Love’s fire heats water,” or causes burning urine, leading him to seek “a
bath and healthful remedy/For men diseased.” Th is bath—as we have
seen—was the treatment of choice for a terrifying new epidemic dis-
ease: syphilis.
SHAKESPEARE'S  TREMOR  AND  
ORWELL'S  COUGH

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